My Love Affair with Volusion
March 26, 2014
My Love Affair with Volusion
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
3
Overall Satisfaction
Volusion was used as our eCommerce solution for over 3 years. It allowed us to have a user friendly website with a client friendly backend that covers everything from B2B sales, Direct to Consumer sales, email marketing, client friendly WYSIWYG editors on all products and pages, simple and reliable payment processing, and more. The most rewarding part about Volusion is that they have almost everything you would need for standard eCommerce sales and makes it easy enough to present that almost anyone with a little training can maintain a multi-million dollar online store with hundreds or thousands of products. Huge bonuses were the inventory tracking, kitting options, and automatic emailing.
- Easy to Use. Non-technical employees can be simply trained. If you can use a social network, you can manage the backend of Volusion.
- All-In-One -- without any add-ons, Volusion is a turnkey solution for eCommerce. No programming knowledge is required, no modules are needed (unless you have very advanced needs), and it features everything from website text, products, email marketing, customer accounts, shipping calculations, and back-end payment and order processing.
- Allows for inventory tracking (such as Small, Medium, Large or Male/Female)
- Allows for kitting (creating product bundles, up-sells, add-ons, and more)
- Easy to customize -- with a little HTML knowledge, you can easily customize the free templates included in Volusion to create a personalized, dynamic web presence without the need for hiring expensive designers
- Provides a great experience for the customer. Everything from search results, product display, shopping carts, wishlists, and the actual order process are delivered in a professional manner that will keep your customer feeling confident about making their purchase.
- Easily integratable with Google Analytics with Sales Goal tracking -- this allows you to see where customers are coming from, what they are looking at, what they are purchasing, and when they are abandoning their carts.
- Volusion does not allow for digital downloads to be hosted off-site. This causes problems if you want to deliver any sort of file to your customer as you will have to cover the costs of bandwidth. Volusion offers very limited bandwidth, after you reach the max they will charge you per GB over. Selling music, video files, or software seem to be unreasonable unless you build your bandwidth costs into the cost of the product.
- Some parts of the volusion software are not editable by a typical user. If you need customization beyond the norm you will have to pay large amounts to "volusion partners" who are given extended access. Volusion partners are not always qualified (even though they have been 'certified by volusion') and can jeopardize the security of your website and your customer data so BEWARE.
- Some simple graphics are not customizable such as the UPS shipping logo -- due to licensing you are stuck with a low-grade GIF that will display with a fuzzy white border if your background color is anything but white.
- If you need to integrate with Quickbooks it is strongly suggested you invest in T-Hub as well (the offered solution has lots of holes and does not provide all information required to maintain proper books).
- Payment processing is only standard using Skipjack (which is not a very expansive interface) - using Authorize.net or other processing types requires additonal intergration and usually adds more steps to the order processing. Skipjack does not always return the correct responses so you will want to double check payments and refunds on a regular basis.
- Increased customer service (has build-in ticketing system and user tracking)
- Increased ROI and allowed for ROI tracking with campaign token links
- Increased employee efficiency -- allowing a single person to handle hundreds of daily orders without overloading them. Also saved time for technical people as there is less work in setting up the website and customize the user experience.
- Did not sync beautifully with Quickbooks -- we had to manually enter orders for the first 2 years before investing in T-Hub which did most of this for us. T-Hub did not resolve all issues though and each order had to be manually double-checked to maintain clean books.
- The user to use customer interface helped triple our sales within a few months of moving our online store from Miva Merchant to Volusion.
- Miva Merchant,Magento
Volusion blew Miva out of the water. Magento allows for more customization without having to use 'partners' which helps keeps the cost down but requires a great deal more technical knowledge to create and maintain.
Implementation
- Implemented in-house
Change management was a small part of the implementation and was well-handled
- Integrating with Quickbooks
- Pulling Tracking numbers from Worldship
- Training employees to utilize the extensive resources Volusion offers for customer service
- Payment processing (we had to switch from Authorize.net to Skipjack).